Tag Archives: flour too cookbook

These Cinnamon Cream Brioche pastries from Joanne Chang’s flour, too cookbook are great. A brioche dough base is topped with pastry cream, creme fraiche, and a dusting of cinnamon sugar. Brioche is a rich yeasted dough made with eggs, butter, and sugar. A stand mixer is a definite must, because a large amount of butter must be incorporated into the dough at high speed. My mixing bowl got stuck in the base of the mixer due to the force of mixing. If that happens, I suggest using a mallet to knock the bowl loose. After mixing, the dough must rise in the refrigerator for a minimum of six hours, so it’s good to make the dough and pastry cream in the evening and do the final assembly and baking in the morning. The pastry cream is pretty straightforward: scald some milk, add a mixture of cake flour, sugar, and egg yolks, whisk until thickened, and then let set overnight. In the morning, divide the dough into pieces, shape into rounds, and top with pastry cream, creme fraiche, and cinnamon sugar, and bake.

Couple of notes on how much to make. The recipe calls for half-recipe of brioche dough for eight pastries, but I used the full recipe to make sixteen. I used a double recipe of pastry cream. The creme fraiche I bought from Trader Joe’s, and two tubs were less than what was called for in the recipe but I thought was plenty. The cinnamon sugar in the original recipe (1 1/4 cups sugar + one teaspoon cinnamon) is more than enough for sixteen pastries.

The baked pastry cream, with a little tartness from the creme fraiche and a little sweetness from the cinnamon sugar, all on top of the airy brioche dough, is a great combination and got great comments.